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DIVINE MYCOSIS

DEEP MAYA EXPERIENCE

Palenque, Chiapas a.D.2004

(versione italiana di seguito)

The geckos had been screaming all night like monkeys, flattened against the ceiling of the shack, or hidden among the bark’s creases on the branches, heavy with emerald leaves, suffocating the surrounding space. The four travellers in the shack had not been in the least disturbed by the jungle’s nocturnal clamour, clouded as they were in a dreamless sleep, induced by all the weed they had smoked the previous day. They had left from Villahermosa, where they had met their guide, if one could have called him such: perhaps due to the linguistic barrier between them, perhaps due to the substantial quantities of marijuana he’d receive from his customers as part of their payment – regardless, he was a boy of few words. He wasn’t one of those Ciceros that explain in detail in what year the conquistadores reached a given village to begin their massacre, rape and pillage, indoctrinating all the while the natives; nor would he tell us about when this or that Catholic church had been invasively built on a pre-hispanic place of worship, whose rocks they had pulled out one by one as though they were the fingernails of a prisoner of the Inquisition, only to build new mockingly sinister temple of Christ. No, more than a guide, the boy was a silent ferryman.

The road deepend southward, towards Guatemala, in a thick jungle, with no big cities in sight. Now and then the car would pull to the side of the road, avoiding the notoriously harsh Mexican road humps and allowing the passengers to take refreshment with various products, that groups of local children and women offered for a few pesos: freshly squeezed naranja agria in plastic bottles; cool horchata served in transparent plastic bags, such as those we use to freeze food, from which one would suck the nectar after cutting one of the corners; coconuts you would eat after drinking their juice, mixed with limon agrio e spicy chili; whole bunches of sweet mini-bananas; and if you were particularly lucky, bags of chicharrones, fried chips of pork skin.

Having finally arrived in that sort of campsite, dwelled in mostly by young nostalgic hippies from the USA, they were surprised to find, in the makeshift restaurant of the makeshift camping site, which stood in a clearing of the wild local vegetation, an Italian menu: spaghetti alla bolognese, cotoletta alla milanese and, in the postres section (or desserts), in golden letters that seemed to shine with their own inner light, a sight worthy of the attention of the Vatican commission for the certification of miracles: BREAD AND NUTELLA, $2.

It wasn’t just about the regrets of almost a month of juicy tacos sizzling with animal fat, filled with the most varied ingredients, from fried trip to lamb cooked underground wrapped in banana leaves, or wild chicken, white protagonist exalted by the vivacious red of minced tomatoes and green coriander, or else the hot and comforting quesadillas brimming with warm melted cheese, all accompanied by the omnipresent local salsa and the explosive limon agrio juice. It was more than that: it was the innate and long-buried nostalgia for their homeland that delved them deep in that rather kitsch meal, in which they sunk their barely-brushed teeth (since a week or so), savouring the divine hazelnut cream that is so universally loved and well-known.

P was the first to open his eyes, probably annoyed by the sudden void left by the nocturnal animals’ retirement. Several minutes passed, before the visual impulse, sent by the eyes to the brain, could penetrate the layer of THC and reach its destination. Finally remembering where he was, he got up, and with youthful vitality he went outside to inhale the tropical morning air that he loved so much, charged as it were with fresh humidity.

It was time to get their asses moving and find what they had come to look for. The guide, the last to heavily rise from his pallet, accompanied them toward the campsite’s exit, muttering drowsy pre-hispanic blasphemy. Once outside of the shack, trailing along a porticoed structure with palm-leaf rooftops supported by wooden poles, they caught a glimpse, in the fissures between a pole and the other, of sleeping bodies wrapped up in hammocks, like many silkworms or insects caught in spiderwebs and ready for the spider’s midnight snack. At the campsite, for a buck or two, one could rent a hammock and sleep in open air. Scattered amid the vegetation, tents and little Westfalia vans stood still in the tomb-like silence that followed a lysergic night. Having passed the gate, they strolled on the edge of the carrettera, following the guide, overwhelmed by the morning heat and deafened by the multi-frequence chant of a multitude of tropical birds, which had already begun to sing. After a few steps, out of the blue, an indigenous man of clear Maya descent popped out on the road, riding a maculated mustang horse, patched in white and brown. The horseman proceeded at an easy gait, holding the reins in one hand, on the opposite side of the road, coming towards them. Having reached them, hinting at them with his chin, he whispered: “hongos”.

Found them! It hadn’t been so hard after all. The horseman-dealer, knowing the kind of people who slept at the campsite, knew well where to stride with his horse in order to place his harvest. The desajuno was ensured: a nice bag of magic mushrooms, freshly picked from a steaming cow or horse excrement, perhaps the same horse our dealer rode.

They swallowed the raw mushrooms, like a bunch of hungry beasts, sweating on the side of the road, shaken by retching fits.

“Y ahora?”

“Vamos a las ruinas,” the guide replies.

For fifteen minutes they drove through the deepest green. The tunnel of grey asphalt, among the thick foliage, trailed along huge, staggeringly anti-conformist tree-trunks, surrounded by a tangle of spiralling lianas that rose towards cracks of daylight. The gastric juices had just begun to digest the mushrooms, and their poison had not yet propagated through the intestinal villi.

Like massive phallic sprouts, the tallest Maya temples protruded upwards and out of the thick greenery, as if through the pubes of a large hairy man.

They got out of the car and took the road leading to the entrance of the ruins. P realized colours began to brighten up and the forest’s sounds wavered slightly, as though they were being panned from an ear to the other. Bursts of hot and unmotivated joy vaporised up from his belly to his head. The brain started emptying out its knowledge to fill up with the unknown, floating in the dimension created by the mushroom’s poison. Among the noise, the screech of a faraway bird was singled out by his brain, as if it came from a few steps away. The crackle their steps produced upon the gravel path was amplified, and P tried to walk as lightly as possible, fearing to wake, with that sound, the fury of that ancient jungle. The lightplay the sun projected through the foliage altered continuously in different geometrical forms, like a kaleidoscope filled with green emeralds.

The rest of the world, as well as his past and future life, disappeared from P’s mind. Names, temporal categories, goals and ambitions, all disappeared. Only the pulse of the jungle he inhabited was left. The poison had made him one with the forest.

At the end of the road , P found his friend hunched over a pond, spitting in the water, his face disfigured by nearly hysterical laughter. Each spit that reached the surface was immediately surrounded by dozen little freshwater fish, which perhaps hoped it was an unlucky insect of some kind, ready to be devoured. B, in the meantime, crawling out of the folds in giant tree’s bark, whose roots sprung above the ground and surpassed him in height, kept caressing the bark and repeating:

“Here everything is so humid”.

They climbed like possessed spiders up a steep, pyramidal phallus, clinging to the large steps of ancient stone, trying to reach the sun up there, beyond the vegetation, like tiny sperms competing for life. Once they reached the top, their brain oblivious to the actual physical effects of the hike, huffing and puffing with a throbbing heartbeat, P was chosen as the victim of the sacrifice. Volunteering to lay on the stone seat carved below a jaguar’s head, with the joy of the victim tripping on mushroom and about to be offered to the gods, he offered his chest to the high priest’s blade. B cut it open around the heart, the blade crunching through the ribcage, and, plunging his hand in, he pulled out the still-beating muscle. Reaching with his arms towards the sky, he first offered the spongy, bleeding heart to an insatiable god, then towards a populace in adoration, at the temple’s base, and finally, he bit into it, with an explosion of lukewarm blood, feeling the vital energy of another human being in his mouth. They watched in silence, from above, the immensity of that archeological site, built with bare hand one-thousand and eight-hundred years before. Astronomical geometries gushing out of a luxurious vegetation, inhuman efforts of a desperate attempt to understand or placate, but never tame, such an impetuous nature. The god of the wind, so enraged during storms. The god of the sun, so powerful in the hot summer days. The deep cenotes, mouths of the underworld, in which sacrificial victims could be thrown alive, as a way to satiate the divine hunger.

The trees below warped and curled like a mass of eels, made opaque by the heat, took on the aspect of an old indio’s face, still in his unchanging gaze, going back in time, reversing the forest’s conformation, climbing backwards through the centuries, to find a time segment bound to the stone temples. Serpents of shadow carved across the stone steps, in a lightplay invoked by the ancient inhabitants of the city, liquidly climbing up the pyramidal temple, as in a series of fast-played photograms (yet not fast enough not to perceive the illusion), almost swallowing the red flaming ball of the setting sun.

Several hours went by, centuries in their own dimension, in a joyous contemplation of that thousand-year old homage mankind had tributed to nature’s mystery, watching, with a renewed gaze, their own world.